Microsoft focuses on developers and cloud on Day 2 of Build

SAN FRANCISCO – While the Day 1 keynote at Build yesterday focused on products that were familiar to consumers — Windows and Windows Phone — as well as developers, today’s Day 2 keynote focused mainly on developers’ tools.

Build, Microsoft’s annual conference for independent, third-party developers, is taking place through Friday at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

During the keynote today, Microsoft executives announced new features and products for its Azure cloud platform, as well as that the company would be making open source one of its largest pieces of code.

Among the company’s announcements were:

*Azure Preview Portal, which brings together infrastructure and platform services and integrates Microsoft’s and third party services of the user’s choice, allowing developers and IT workers to create and manage apps in one place. The portal enables developers to manage resources such as Azure Web Sites or databases as a single group, rather than separately.

*The general availability of Visual Studio Online, the online version of the development environment developers use to create applications. Included in this are a lightweight editor to enable the making of code changes without having to leave Azure, the ability to de-bug in Visual Studio also without leaving Azure, and Application Insights, which gathers data on an application’s health and allows for easy retrieval of that data.

*The open-source availability of the .NET compiler platform (code-named “Roslyn”). “This opens up the C# and Visual Basic compilers as APIs that allow developers to share in the wealth of information the compilers store about code,” Microsoft said. Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Cloud and Enterprise, also announced the formation of the .NET Foundation designed to “foster open development and collaboration around the growing collection of open source technologies for .NET.” (.NET is Microsoft’s programming framework used by many developers to create Windows applications.)

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